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The Mount Sinai Medical Center (MSMC) has been honored with the 2012 Davies Enterprise HIMSS Award of Excellence, an award given by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), the nation’s leading hospital information technology society.

Mount Sinai won the award for implementing a $120-million electronic medical records (EMR) system that has improved quality of care and patient safety in numerous ways. One innovative Mount Sinai program described in the award and called the Preventable Admission Care Team (PACT), used the EMR to reduce 30-day readmission rates for Medicare patients by 56 percent, an important goal of the nation’s new Affordable Care Act.

HIMSS cited the medical center’s establishment of a “strong governance structure, a formal change management program and advanced clinical innovations.”

“The long term benefits of our expansive EMR system, which I consider the backbone of our care today, are far reaching,” said Kenneth L. Davis, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Mount Sinai Medical Center. “It enables new reimbursement models, improvements in safety and quality, and accelerated research and innovation.”

“We are extremely pleased to be honored by HIMSS with an award that reflects the broad, sustained efforts of the entire Mount Sinai community to adopt a forward looking and integrated digital EMR system,” said Kumar Chatani, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Mount Sinai.

“Implementation of the Epic EMR system was not merely a technical installation, but a medical center-wide clinical transformation initiative,” said Kristin Myers, Vice President of Information Technology at Mount Sinai, who has led the program since its inception. “It involved changing behavior. The human dimension, people, determined how successful the program was.”

“It is our pleasure to announce that The Mount Sinai Medical Center has received the Davies Enterprise Award. Their implementation of health care technology has allowed them to reach excellent clinical and financial value in the challenging environment of a medical teach, patient care, and research facility,” said Eric Hartz, MD, Chair, HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award Committee and CMIO, Trinity Healthcare. (For news release, go to http://www.noodls.com/view/AC9724CBA529AD1470277D6A55343A72DCB81A1E).

The PACT program used the EMR to identify Medicare patients at risk of being readmitted and enrolled them in a program that assessed “psychological drivers of readmission” which were addressed by social workers for each individual patient identified upon initial discharge. This process “hard wired key workflow processes required to reduce readmission, improve care and lower the costs of care.” The result: 30-day readmissions were reduced by 58 percent in emergency department visits and a 51 percent reduction in hospital re-admissions, for a targeted group of high-risk patients at 60 and 90 days of discharge, a key accomplishment that reflects a major goal of the Affordable Care Act.

Mount Sinai was also cited for its massive training and “change management” initiative that brought about a clinical transformation of the entire medical center and involved 7,149 employees who learned to use the new EMR system. Behavioral change and training included the novel use of actors and technology-enable mannequins to ensure physicians, residents and other clinical staff were properly trained in real life scenarios before the EMR system went live.

The medical center won praise for its “strong leadership and governance model” including a mandate for physicians to use EMRs, intensive senior executive involvement and communication, the inclusion of 20 physician champions and 20 front-line nurses, and early collaboration with the nurses’ union.

The award highlights Mount Sinai’s establishment of “clinical value” using the new Epic EMR system. One example given was improved monitoring capabilities for patient vaccinations using a centralized database. Previously patient vaccination records were in separate outpatient and inpatient databases.

The award described Mount Sinai’s use of the EMR system to reap “hard returns on investment” such as saving the medical center more than $20 million year to date, much of it for reduced transcription costs and savings from reduced supplies and management expenses for paper medical records.

About The Mount Sinai Medical Center

The Mount Sinai Medical Center encompasses both The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Established in 1968, Mount Sinai School of Medicine is one of the leading medical schools in the United States. The Medical School is noted for innovation in education, biomedical research, clinical care delivery, and local and global community service. It has more than 3,400 faculty in 32 departments and 14 research institutes, and ranks among the top 20 medical schools both in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding and by U.S. News & World Report.

The Mount Sinai Hospital, founded in 1852, is a 1,171-bed tertiary- and quaternary-care teaching facility and one of the nation’s oldest, largest and most-respected voluntary hospitals. In 2012, U.S. News & World Report ranked The Mount Sinai Hospital 14th on its elite Honor Roll of the nation’s top hospitals based on reputation, safety, and other patient-care factors. Mount Sinai is one of 12 integrated academic medical centers whose medical school ranks among the top 20 in NIH funding and by U.S. News & World Report and whose hospital is on the U.S. News & World Report Honor Roll. Nearly 60,000 people were treated at Mount Sinai as inpatients last year, and approximately 560,000 outpatient visits took place.